!dev

What's the difference between the middle two options? Surely 'a few weeks' is about as long as or longer than a month?

few weeks can be 4-5-6 which is 1.5m

It’s an attempted get about the English limitations of the term “biweekly” and “bimonthly”.

Biweekly is understood to mean either “twice weekly” or “every other week”. And bimonthly is the same “twice monthly” or “every other month”. And yes, they do over lap as anything that happens biweekly (either sense) is also bimonthly (first sense) depending on the cadence.

Quarterly means once every three months so trimonthly isn’t a real term. And as a month usually has four weeks; you would be running weekly anyway.

But they clearly want an option that's between once a week and once a month. Why not 'more than once a month'?

I'm not a linguist but as "few" isn't a clearly defined number but means a low amount in general, it probably means "every two/three weeks" in this context.

There's nothing that says it has to be longer than a month.

@deadlyRants The ambiguity of ‘few’ is certainly an issue. I’d say ‘few’ means at least 3 though, with ‘couple’ taking the 2 ground.

I suspect they're working from the assumption that people tend to think in terms of the largest reasonable units for the time period under discussion, as well as using context clues to imply that the second answer means less frequently than weekly but less frequently than monthly. People think in sequences, and the survey is written to exploit that fact.

It might have been better to say "every other week" or even "fortnightly".

@deadlyRants I've always heard a "few" as 3+. A "couple" is 2. Just as @joycestick said.

I think "once every couple weeks" would be a more evenly-spaced option to include.

I think “few” has a slightly different meaning when you’re talking about trends. I would take it to mean “averages around three weeks”.

Avast is better. It lets you postpone stuff into the next century!